Storage of items on walls has long presented a significant problem. In the home environment, for example, garage walls, among others, are commonly used to hang and store a wide variety of items. The types of goods involve may include lawn and garden tools, snow shovels, sporting goods, camping equipment, and many other things. A wide variety of wall storage systems have been developed as a result.
One prior art Rubbermaid™ system has provided a metal rail-based system. The metal rails are mountable horizontally along a wall, and metal article hanging hooks of various shapes and sizes can be slidably mounted to the rails. By use of multiple rails, hooks can be arranged at varying locations both horizontally along a wall and vertically with respect to each along multiple rails mounted one over the other vertically on the wall.
The Rubbermaid™ system is relatively heavy, expensive, and difficult to install. If the user desires to have multiple hooks space vertically from each other along a wall, the user must install multiple rails. If a particular vertical spacing will be need, the installer must determine that spacing in advance and maintain as the rails are mounted to the wall.
Storage of snow skis on a wall has long presented significant problems in particular. For example, a family or ski team may have a number of skiers who each have one or pairs of skis of varying lengths. The differing pairs of skis often have bindings mounted on them of varying length and thicknesses as well.
One common ski storage system has consisted of a single horizontally mounted board with a number of horizontally spaced wooden pegs extending perpendicularly from the board along the associated wall (see FIGS. 1-3). As is shown in FIG. 1, however, this board-and-peg system will allow for storage of only a relatively few pairs of skis adjacent a wall unless, as shown in FIGS. 2 and 3, the various pairs of skis are hung on the pegs so that they extend at differing angles from the wall. This arrangement consumes space distal from the wall, as can be seen in FIG. 1. The skis often are easily knocked off the board-and-peg rack as people, cars, bikes, etc., bump into them, and removal of a given pair of skis often requires removal and remounting of multiple other pairs of skis.
Falling skis can do damage to the surrounding environment, including people in that environment. The skis can themselves be damaged too when they fall off the rack.
This board-and-peg ski storage system also commonly fails, as the wooden pegs break. This system can be similarly inefficient for wall storage of other types of articles either with or without skis on the rack.